A Bulletin of Socialist Economic Analysis published by Ken Livingstone
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Thursday, 30 June 1983

Thatcher and Friends: Chapter 9 - The Social Base of the Tory Vote

By John Ross

The reality of the rise and decline of the Conservative Party becomes even
clearer if we now turn from mapping its gains and losses geographically to the
social processes which underlie these shifts. If we take first the broadest
divisions within the British state - those between the nations which have
historically comprised it - then the best available guides to their relative
economic and social positions over long periods of time are their respective per
capita assessments for tax. Table 10 therefore shows these for periods since the
beginning of the nineteenth century. As we are concerned here with
relative economic position, we have expressed all figures as a percentage
of the assessment for England.

Table 10

As can be seen from these figures, Ireland has remained consistently by far
the poorest national within the British state. Ranking next after Ireland, but a
long way ahead, comes Wales. England has remained, with the exception of one
short period, easily and consistently the richest part of the British state.

The one case which shows a change in its relative position overtime is
Scotland. Scotland started the nineteenth century even poorer than Wales and
remained, relative to England, extremely poor until the mid-nineteenth century.
But from the latter part of the nineteenth century onwards Scotland's position
improved rapidly so that its average per capita assessment for tax actually was
higher than England by the period immediately following the First World War.
Then a new decline set in: by the 1960s Scotland had again fallen behind
England.

The relation of these economic and social unevennesses to the levels of Tory
support we looked at earlier is obvious. The majority Catholic population of
Ireland, living in the consistently poorest part of the British state after
Ireland, was the other absolutely consistent area of Tory failure from the 1860s
onwards. The specific path of Conservative development in Scotland – low support
in the mid-nineteenth century, rising support in the period around the First
World War, and then a collapse from the 1950s onwards - evidently correlates
perfectly with the changing relative economic position of Scotland itself.
England, the consistently richest part of the British state, is the traditional
stronghold of the Conservative Party. The correlation between relative economic
and social position and degree of support for the Conservative Party is
complete.

Exactly the same pattern is shown if regional unevennesses, as well as
national, are considered. Within Ireland British and Unionist rule
systematically built up a comparatively privileged position for the Protestant
working class of the North as against the Catholic South. Taking indexes of
poverty to illustrate this, by 1891 the number of paupers in Belfast was only
half the level of Catholic South. Taking indexes of poverty to illustrate this,
by 1891 the number of paupers in Belfast was only half the level of Catholic
Dublin and only a quarter that of Catholic Cork, Waterford, and Limerick.
Skilled building workers in Belfast, chiefly Protestants, had wage rates higher
than areas of England such as Yorkshire, the North of England, and Scotland.
From 1945 to 1965 less factory space was built by the North of Ireland
government in a city with a Catholic majority (such as Derry) than in a
Protestant city with a much smaller population (such as Larne). Prior to 1974
the Protestant working class of the North of Ireland was the most secure of all
mass urban bases of the Conservative Party.

Within Scotland the average figures do not show the incredible difference
between the West Coast industrial towns, centred on Glasgow, and the other areas
of the country. By 1971, the last census for which full figures are available,
Glasgow had only half the number of "upper professional" occupations compared to
Britain as a whole, but twice the average rate of male unemployment, half the
average level of car ownership, and by far the highest incidence of infant
mortality in Britain. By 1983 there was not a single Conservative MP elected
from a Glasgow constituency.

In Wales the most basic social division is between the industrial south and
the rural north - coupled with a fundamental language question. As late as 1891
the majority of the population of Wales was still Welsh-speaking. In 1961 the
figure was still 27 per cent - which can be compared to under 2 per cent for
Gaelic-speaking in Scotland. By 1983 the Conservative Party was gaining 45 per
cent of the vote in rural Powys, but only 19 per cent in Mid-Glamorgan. Plaid
Cymru was strong in Welsh-speaking North Wales, gaining 33 per cent of the vote
in Gwynedd.

In England itself the distinctions between the regions are well indicated by
comparing wage levels for standard industries between different cities. The
pattern at the turn of the century is quite clear: the Tory stronghold of London
had the highest wage rates in every major job category (bricklayer, engineer,
printing compositor, etc) followed by the Conservative-dominated cities of the
North West of England and Birmingham. Leeds (Yorkshire) and Newcastle (the
North-East) had low wage rates and were areas of classic Tory failure.

The same pattern prevails today. Average personal income is higher in the
South East, rates of unemployment lower and Tory percentages of the vote higher
than anywhere else in the country. The Tory areas of support are, with minor
exceptions, those with low rates of unemployment and high rates of pay. The
famous North-South divide is rooted in an immense social reality.

Opinion polls

If we now turn to the Tory decline after the Second World War then here
analysis of geography and social trends can be supplemented through opinion
polls and similar types of studies. As all the different types of analysis
cross-correlate, there is little doubt that the social shifts in Tory support
are being accurately followed. Looking first at the initial period of post-war
Tory decline from 1955 to 1964, Gallup Poll studies show a general drop in Tory
support among all social groups: the percentages of the upper middle class, the
middle class and the very poor voting Tory all fell by 12 per cent in this
period, while the percentage of the working-class vote fell by 8 per cent.
Although the social criteria used in these studies are crude, there is no reason
to doubt that they show an underlying trend of some significance.

This is borne out by taking the more detailed breakdown of opinion poll
studies available for the period from 1964 onwards(see Table 11). The figures
used for 1979 and 1983 in this Table are those published for the Harris "exit
poll". Substitution of, for example, the published MORI figures would give
slightly different absolute figures but identical trends. As can be seen, Tory
support fell between 1964 and 1983 in every social category except skilled
workers. Among skilled workers, Tory support actually increased.

Table 11

If we want to look at the structural shifts taking place, however, and to
ignore the inevitable political fluctuations which take place from election to
election, then support for the Tory Party in different social layers must be
compared to support in the population as a whole. In Table 12, therefore, we
give the difference between Tory support among different social groups compared
to Tory support in the population as a whole in elections since 1964.

Table 12

The structural trends shown are quite clear and coherent -confirming that the
polls are accurately reflecting social processes. The Tory vote has been lowest,
and relatively constant compared to Conservative support in the population as a
whole, among semi-skilled and unskilled workers. The Conservatives' relative
advantage among the professional middle class, and among white-collar workers,
has been eroded steadily and by 1983 was quite low among white-collar workers.
However, the fact that the Tory Party actually increased its vote among skilled
manual workers means that the relative Conservative unpopularity here had almost
disappeared by 1983. Thatcher's unique success with skilled workers enabled her
to arrest - even to reverse in the short term – the structural decline in Tory
support.

Considered historically, however, higher-paid, and in this case skilled,
workers are precisely the mass social base which the Tory Party had so
laboriously built up during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Thatcher, in other words, has not succeeded in historically winning new
layers to the Tory Party; she has simply reactivated the absolute core of its
old mass base. This fact is confirmed by the geographical areas of support we
looked at earlier.

Tory failures

The reality of the continuing social erosion of Conservative Party support
shows up still more clearly if we now turn from those areas where Thatcher
has succeeded in conjuncturally reversing the situation to those where
she has had no success whatever. By far the most important of these is among
women voters - indeed, about four-fifths of the decline of the Tory Party vote
since 1955 can be explained by loss of Conservative votes among women. From 8
percent more women than men voting Conservative in 1955 the difference fell to 5
per cent in 1964, 2 per cent in February 1974, 0 per cent in 1979 and actually 3
per cent fewer women than men voting Conservative in 1983, according to
Gallup polls.

Other studies, for example MORI and Harris polls, still show more women than
men voting Tory in 1983. All of them, however, show a declining Conservative
vote among women compared to men.
These studies on the sexual composition of the vote correlate with those on
its social composition. In the 1971 census women comprised only 14 per cent of
skilled manual workers, but 39 percent of professional workers, 44 per cent of
semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers, and 71 per cent of clerical workers.
The studies showing declining Conservative support among professional groups,
unskilled workers, and clerical workers, but increasing Conservative support
among skilled manual workers, therefore correlate perfectly with surveys showing
the Tory vote holding up far better among men than among women.

A similar trend exists among black workers - also heavily concentrated in
layers other than skilled manual. All studies show that up to 1979 85-90 per
cent of black people voted for the Labour Party - we do not yet have figures for
1983. Moreover, a survey carried out for the Commission for Racial Equality
found an increasing trend in the 1970s for black people to mobilise
themselves electorally against the Conservative Party. In 1979 the South East
constituency with the lowest swing to the Tories was the Asian stronghold of
Southall - with a swing to the Tories of only 0.8 percent compared to an average
in London of 6.4 per cent. In England two seats with large numbers of black
voters - Bradford West and Leicester South - actually swung in favour of the
Labour Party in 1979. While the average swing to the Tories in Birmingham in
1979 was 6.7 per cent, in the four constituencies with over 10 per cent of black
voters the average swing was only 3.0 per cent.

Finally, the most increasingly anti-Tory of all groups, as one would expect,
is the unemployed. Here a particularly clear view of the political effects of
areas of high unemployment can be gained from the fortunate coincidence that the
1981 census followed fairly rapidly after the 1979 election. This allows a
constituency-by-constituency study to be made. The pattern is clear. Only 8 out
of the 100 constituencies in Britain with the highest unemployment in 1979 were
in Southern England, i.e. in the heartland dominated by the Tory Party. In
contrast, all 100 of the constituencies with the lowest rate of unemployment
were in the Conservative-controlled South East. The 10 seats in Britain with the
highest rate of unemployment averaged a 60 per cent Labour vote in 1979 compared
to a 38 per cent average in Britain as a whole. In the same year Labour held 95
out of the 100 seats with the highest levels of unemployment and 166 out of the
200 with the highest levels. Opinion poll studies show that the Tory vote among
the unemployed fell by 10 per cent in 1983 - the greatest fall for any social
group.

Other layers among which the Tory Party has seen a significant decline in its
support are council tenants (Labour led the Conservatives by 27 per cent in
1983), and pensioners (in 1983 the Tory vote fell by 3 per cent - the largest
for any age group).These Tory falls in the vote among the unemployed, blacks,
council house tenants, and those dependent on state benefits of course help
explain the particularly sharp fall in support for the Tory Party in the big
cities which we noted in the last chapter.

Finally, we can also see how socially as well as geographically the Tory
Party continues to break at its weak links. Thatcher has revitalised the
old core of the Tory vote geographically and socially and done great damage to
the Labour Party. But she has not been able to arrest the underlying social
trends of decline in Tory support. The long decline of the Tory vote we started
the book with is precisely the underlying break-up of the social alliances on
which the old Conservative supremacy was based. Thatcher has been unable
to halt this progressive erosion of the Tory bloc "from the edges".